High Sobriety (19 page)

Before I leave, I ask Gillan where she'd like to see Scotland in ten years. On her wish list is greater regulation so that alcohol costs more and is less accessible, and children are not ‘saturated' with drinking messages. ‘If we had all of that, then I wouldn't expect the number of people to die. I would expect half our jails to be empty because 50 per cent of our prisoners were drunk at the time of the offence. Our accident and emergency departments would not be warzones at the weekend. I'd like low alcohol consumption to be the norm, and I'd like those who choose not to drink to be supported in their choice.'

After we say our goodbyes, I reflect on her crusade. It's an admirable one. But I'm not sure I share her view that the alcohol industry carries so much of the blame for youth binge drinking. Teenagers are risk-takers; getting drunk is about testing boundaries and experimenting. I started drinking at 13 and, unless the industry marketing machine was so sophisticated that I didn't realise I was being targeted, I don't think advertising played much, if any, role in why I did it. Although today's teenager might be bombarded with colourful alcopops designed to appeal to an unsophisticated palate, when I was young there weren't any sweet-tasting drinks to mask the foul taste of hard liquor. It didn't deter me.

I walk back to Mum's flat via Bruntsfield Links, a green space popular with tourists for being one of the earliest known locations where the game of golf was played, sometime around the 15th century. For me it brings back teenage memories of lazy afternoons lying in the sunshine with friends, drinking a carryout and smoking fags. I throw my bag on the ground and lie down, resting my head on it. Not much has changed. To my left a group of teenagers, boys and girls aged 18 or 19, are sprawled out in a circle, drinking cider and playing guitars. I can smell hash. They're approached by a German man riding a unicycle, and they collapse into giggles. Before long, everyone is giving the unicycle a go.

Behind me, another group of girls, who look about 15 or 16, are talking about T in the Park, Scotland's biggest music festival. The T stands for Tennent's, a Scottish brewery and the festival's major sponsor since it began in 1994, my last year of high school. Last time I went it was 1995, and The Prodigy, Supergrass, and The Verve were among the headline acts. I was pissed for two days, but I didn't drink Tennent's. The girls are excited because they've discovered vodka pouches, single-serve soft packs of spirits that they plan to smuggle past security in their wellies. The conversation shifts to the weekend just gone. ‘I was absolutely steamin'. I was, like, still drunk the next day at two o'clock. Then I went out the next night, got home at 5.30, and Sarah's parents woke us up at, like, nine o'clock. Then I totally had this rash cos I was just, like, so rundown. For two nights I'd had, like, six hours asleep, and I just spewed.' All three girls burst out laughing.

When I get back to the flat, I start to sift through my childhood. Mum's living room is strewn with bags and boxes of stuff I've collected over the years, retrieved from the attic of our family home last year after my parents sold up. This is the first chance I've had to go through it. There are letters from pen pals in Denmark and Australia, and certificates for swimming, skiing, and tap dancing, and a Brownie tea-making badge. I find the order of service for Granddad's funeral, and a small piece of card that says ‘cord number 3' — a pallbearer's instructions. There are several editions of ‘Paw's Fitba Talk'
,
a monthly newsletter Dad wrote for me about Scottish football when I was living in New Zealand: twelve editions of pure love. I laugh at handwritten notes Fiona passed to me during history class, her acerbic assessment of our teachers even funnier today given she's now a teacher herself. There are literally hundreds of photographs of the two of us. We're pissed in many of them.

When Fiona comes over for dinner and to look through the boxes, I bring up the more outrageous moments of our teenage years — the time we sneaked vodka from my parents' drinks cabinet at lunchtime and giggled our way through choir practice, or the day my folks came back unexpectedly early from a golf day in St Andrews, and we had to hide beer cans down the back of the couch and tip ashtrays into our pockets. She claims amnesia, joking the next day on Facebook that she's seeking the services of a libel lawyer. But my diaries don't lie. It seems that I was drunk for pretty much the whole of the '90s and most of the 2000s.

One diary entry stands out more than most: October 1992. I was 16.

I feel like I'm growing up too fast. I go out
every
weekend to pubs and get totally drunk. I have to stop drinking because according to everyone (all guys incidentally) I'm a much nicer person when I'm sober. But it's a vicious circle. If I'm drunk I talk to people and meet people with confidence in myself and they tend not to like me but if I stay sober I
don't
talk to people or meet people because I'm too shy and they won't be able to find out if I'm nice or not. I just want to die. My life is so shit just now. I hate school and I don't even have anything to look forward to at the weekend anymore.

I stare at the words, the handwriting so messy and childlike. The melodrama makes me smile. It was, and sometimes still is, my forte. But the underlying point is hard to ignore: for 20 years I've been drinking like this. And I was questioning it even at the start. I drank for confidence and to chat to guys. It left me feeling depressed, dissatisfied, and bored. How much has changed? I think about Jon Currie's offer to test my brain and decide I'm going to do it. Maybe it will help me to understand how much of my adult personality — my anxiety and bouts of depression, my impulsivity and short temper — have been caused by getting drunk as a teenager. The results might not be pleasant, but I need to know.

July

MUM AND I
are taking a road trip. I've travelled to every state and territory in Australia, an island continent that could fit Scotland 97 times, but to my shame I've seen very little of my compact homeland. Despite spending the first 25 years of my life in Edinburgh, I rarely ventured past Glasgow, which is less than an hour's drive away. Yet the yearning to see more of my country grows stronger with every year I'm away. My mum's family were highlanders and, although she grew up in Edinburgh, she spent many happy summers with her aunt in a small village called Whitebridge, on the south shore of Loch Ness. She wants to take me there; I can't wait. Perhaps by touring these historic areas I'll get some clues as to why drinking is such an integral part of my national identity.

The morning we set out is the kind of Scottish summer's day that has to be seen to be believed. It's ten degrees and
dreich
— a Scottish term, invented because no other word could adequately capture the unique brand of soggy, grey misery known only to our shores. It's pronounced with emphasis on the guttural sound of the last two letters, and Mum maintains that it should be spat out like an unwelcome taste, as if in direct reference to the weather it represents. As we drive out of Edinburgh, towards Fife, on the city bypass, rain teems down in sheets. One of Scotland's most iconic landmarks, the Forth Rail Bridge is all but obscured, its majestic peaks shrouded under low-lying cloud. The sky ahead is gunmetal grey as we drive north into Perthshire. Douglas firs line the road, their proud silhouettes stretching in neat rows all the way up the ranges to the west. I can smell the pine wafting through the air vents, and immediately I'm back in my parents' living room on Christmas Eve, sitting cross-legged in the dark before a tree straining under the weight of tinsel and toilet paper–tube Santas. If ever I feel alone, all I have to do is remember that smell.

At times, the rain falls so hard that I can barely see the car in front of me. I'm annoyed that this precious time with Mum should be so rudely blighted. But this is home; it's always been this way. Ask a Scotsman what he calls six weeks of rain, and he'll reply, ‘Summer.' Scotland is often at her most dramatic when enveloped in mist or drizzle. Ours is a history of struggle, a past steeped in bloody battles and violent uprisings. It's only fitting that the weather should match that.

We arrive in Pitlochry, gateway to the Highlands, and head up a narrow road to the hotel where we'll be spending the night. When I see it, I think Mum must be having a laugh. As if travelling through the Highlands — where there are more pubs and distilleries than people — completely sober isn't enough of a challenge, Mum has booked us into a brewery for the night. The hotel, which has been a travellers' rest since 1695, boasts some of the region's finest ales, with evocative names such as Braveheart and Old Remedial, none of which I'll be enjoying. Over lunch, Mum giggles, telling me, ‘I wanted it to be authentic for you,' as she clinks her delicious-looking amber ale against my sad glass of Diet Coke. When I ask her why we Scots don't always look each other in the eye when we say
slàinte mhath
(the equivalent of ‘cheers', meaning ‘your very good health'), as is customary in Australia, she's not sure, but suggests perhaps it's because the priority is to keep an eye on your drink so you don't spill any.

In keeping with the tone, we decide to while away the wet afternoon in a distillery. We trundle down a snaky single-track road until we arrive at Edradour, the smallest distillery in Scotland. This is the very type of business the alcohol industry claims will face closure should a minimum price for alcohol be introduced. That would be a sad day indeed. This place is charming beyond words. Unlike the larger operations, which use computerised systems to mass-produce a drink that has a global market, Edradour is the last distillery in Scotland where you can see malt whisky made by hand. They use the same traditional copper-pot stills as the bigger distilleries, but they're much smaller, the largest one holding just 800 gallons of whisky — which, to my mind, still seems like an enormous amount of Scotch. But here at Edradour, our kilted tour guide tells us, they produce in a year what the big distilleries make in a week: just 15 casks. The whisky sits in the warehouse in its cask for ten years. About a quarter of each barrel will evaporate over that time. This is called ‘the angels' share'. It's not hard to see how we developed a national obsession with drinking; the language of alcohol in Scotland is heavenly. We pay the amber drop so much reverence; is it any wonder I've grown up to be such a prolific drinker?

Our guide tells us that, unlike wine, malt whisky doesn't mature in the bottle, so ‘if you buy it, drink it'. When the tray of sample drams is handed around, I don't have to be told what to do. I accept the glass, nose it — breathing in the fumes of a drink that, despite Mum's marketing campaign, has always smelled to me like drain cleaner — and pour it, discreetly, into her glass. Even with my unpatriotic palate, I still feel like I'm missing out. Any other time I would down that dram, just because it's there; refusing a free drink just isn't in me. And at 63 per cent alcohol, if nothing else it would warm me up.

When we wake the following day, it's still overcast, but the rain has stopped. I stick my head out the window of our top-floor room (a place that isn't without charm but, with its wall-to-wall tartan, invokes a claustrophobic sense of being trapped inside a shortbread tin) and inhale the cleansing air. I feel energised in one breath. We head out early and sit on the banks of the River Tummel, a mesmerising, fast-flowing expanse of water. The salmon making their way to spawning grounds upstream are battling a strong current, occasionally leaping out of the water on their epic journey. I watch in admiration, knowing how hard it is to swim against a tide that tries so intently to pull you back the way you came.

To get a bird's-eye perspective of the area, we head up to Queen's View. This scenic lookout was made famous by a visit from Queen Victoria in 1866, but is actually thought to have been named after Queen Isabella, wife of Robert the Bruce. It's a sight fit for a queen: lush greenery hugs the banks of a loch as clear and still as glass, stretching all the way into the Glencoe mountains to the west. It's staggeringly beautiful. Other than the electricity pylons and the narrow road that winds through the hills, there's little sign that the landscape has changed in centuries. It's hard to believe a place so tranquil has such a savage history.

At dinner, I'm faced with a dilemma. The traditional Scottish menu offers few options that haven't been fried, baked, stewed, poached, or otherwise doused in alcohol. There's venison with a port-and-cranberry jus, salmon in a chardonnay-and-chive cream sauce, duck with black cherries and blackcurrant liqueur, and an Angus fillet of beef in a whisky sauce. It feels almost traitorous to go for boring old chicken, or vegetarian lasagne, so I pick the local salmon, hoping that the cooking process will render the alcohol content of my meal negligible. As we tuck in, I feel conspicuous not drinking with my meal. Like us, most of the people in this quaint dining room, with its tartan tablecloths and pictures of native birds and fish, are visitors to the area. They're marking their holidays by drinking bottles of wine and sampling the local beer and malt whisky. I feel as if I'm not getting the full Highland experience by sipping water.

Mum says it's funny that I feel so exposed when it wasn't that long ago the sight of a woman drinking would have scandalised the locals. In the 1960s, when she was young, Scottish women didn't drink in public. Drinking out of a bottle would be enough to classify you as a loose woman. Pub windows would often be blacked out, or have the lower halves frosted, to prevent people from looking in. This, Mum says, was partly to protect children from witnessing the effects of the ‘demon drink', but also so that men could enjoy a beer without their nosy womenfolk knowing where they were. ‘It was a man's right to drink and not be seen,' Mum says.